Same for domestic partners. They push you into their desktop version for some reason, but the desktop version is a buggy pile of trash. I wasn't able to use it at all even on a windows machine. To their credit, they did refund the software without too much of a hassle (I expected a giant fight).
Agreed. To quote Leslie Lamport, "the hardest part of TLA+ is learning to think abstractly."
There's always a moment, usually annoyingly late in the process, where I realize I've been massively overthinking everything or solving the wrong problem. Time is an essential an ingredient. Clear thinking is extremely hard.
LLMs are definitely useful along the way, but the thinking is the spiritually fulfilling part.
1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0]
2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live).
But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with the Pavlovian response developers have to the word "scale" and you've got an army of people using the worst possible tech for their usecase. Everyone eventually pairs DDB with Elastic whenever "Oh, wait, so we need to be able to query our data?" hits.
[0] And you ONLY need PK reads. Querying turns "infinite scale" into "infinite throttles."
Agree. I didn’t like being forced to use it. There was some edict based on some different past problems. My service was a devops thing and didn’t really have a data plane. A regular db would have been perfect but would have required some silly high level approval we weren’t willing to get. All that despite being told service teams are free to build how they want
>so distant from daily routine that it seems completely pointless
imo, this is a problem with how it's taught! Order theory is super useful in programming. The main challenge, beyond breaking past that barrier of perceived "pointlessness," is getting away from the totally ordered / "Comparator" view of the world. Preorders are powerful.
It gives us a different way to think about what correct means when we test. For example, state machine transitions can sometimes be viewed as a preorder. And if you can squeeze it into that shape, complicated tests can reduce down to asserting that <= holds. It usually takes a lot of thinking, because it IS far from the daily routine, but by the same rationale, forcing it into your daily routing makes it familiar. It let's you look at tests and go "oh, I bet that condition expression can be modeled as a preorder on [blah]"
Agree. AI is (currently) fantastic at "de-bullshitifying" the internet. "Give me a table that compares Products A & B by z, y, and z." Companies have gone out of their way to make comparison shopping near impossible. Specs are hidden, if they're shown at all. Just figuring out if a certain TV had an ARC-HDMI out required downloading the manual.
I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.
But the chatbot will take as a source the comparision data provided by companies! It's very common practice for a company to do some SEO articles with comparing them to their competitor like "FooSoft vs BarSoft", with things like "FooSoft has instant support 24/7, Barsoft has tickets that take 24 hours.."
No, I do not, I mentioned asmuch in my post. But I do not hold it against those that do. I think if you want to make a point across, doing this the most effective way without detracting from the point is a good thing.
No amount of FBI stats about how often "assault" rifles are used will change people's minds. They don't like them and so want to take them away.
I don't know how to square the same people saying we're living under a tyrannical government also pushing legislation that makes sure said tyrannical government is the only one with guns.
I can't square people who think owning a gun will stop or prevent a tyrannical government. Especially when the tyrannical government just leverages its supporters as a vigilante force.
An armed populace creates a huge risk for a federal paramilitary force descending on a municipality with the intent to terrorize the citizens. They're not rolling in with tomahawks and tanks, they're coming in with assault rifles and window breakers.
It won't "stop" them but having to treat everyone like they might shoot back and show up with a 10:1 manpower advantage and armed to the teeth every time you wanna subject someone to state violence really puts a damper on your ability to do tyrannical government things.
Not at all true. I haven't yet witnessed armed resistance to ICE, but it's in the cards, if the government wants to push. Given the number of veterans and folks that actually have skill with guns in the civilian populace, and the hiring standards of ICE, I think the civilian population, properly mobilized, would be incredibly effective at putting a damper on their illegal behavior.
It's an extremely dangerous line to cross, and it should be avoided if at all possible. At the same time, when no other options are available, it's better to be armed than not. I hope you never have to learn this first-hand.
It kind of is in that they're picking the easy targets. They're not being sloppy in places where wrong address has an unacceptably high (but still small) chance of having them confused for the DEA and shot back at by someone who isn't going to prison one way or another.
The problem with that thinking is that you have to have the will to act to stop tyranny, and no amount of armament will give you the will or the foresight to see it.
The real AI fatigue is the constant background irritation I have when interacting with LLMs.
"You're not imagining it"
"You're not crazy"
"You're absolutely right!"
"Your right to push back on this"
"Here's the no fluff, correct, non-reddit answer"
“You’re not [X]—you’re [Y]” is the one that drives me nuts. [X] is typically some negative characterization that, without RLHF, the model would likely just state directly. I get enough politics/subtext from humans. I’d rather the LLM just call it straight.
>software engineers today are 100x more productive
Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.
I would say I'm like 1.2x more productive, and I think I'm more of the typical case (of course I read all of the code the LLM produces, so maybe that's where I've gone wrong).
They are the people who have the design sense of someone like Rob Pike but lack his coding skill. These people are now 100x more capable than they were previously.
"we have taken latest AI subscription. We expect you to be able to increase productivity and complete 5/10/100 stories per sprint from now on instead of one per sprint that we planned previously".
Citation needed. For both the existence of said people (how do you develop said design sense without a ton of coding experience?) and that they are 100x more productive.
If you produced 1 line of code per hour before "AI" because you suck, and now produce 100 lines of code per hour with AI, you are now a 100x programmer.
I'm joking of course, but that's probably how some people see it.
No I think you're 100% correct. But these people also miss out on the irony that using "lines of code" as a metric is a literal meme amongst software developers.
A lot of pride is wrapped up in the craft of writing software. If that goes away (I don't think it will) it would leave a lot of people wondering how they spent all their time.
(or something like that. Obviously I'm too well adjusted to have these existential worries)
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